Four Quiet Lives Natasha Never Led, and How It Always Turned Out
by karabair
Summary: Natasha sometimes wonders about the quiet lives she could have led. She suspects they wouldn't be all that quiet. Inspired by "Not the One to Praise" by Genarti


Work Text:

 **2016 - Peaceful Valley, Washington**

Natasha has a secret 'fuck off' fund. She's been working on it since a long time before Jezebel started running think pieces about how every woman needs one. It's not a fortune: she had to leave everything behind when she came over to SHIELD. Since then, Fury's been seeing she's paid well enough that she won't go back to the Dark Side, whichever side that is these days. But she's not making enough that it would be too easy for her to, well, fuck off.

But a Soviet childhood taught her how to be frugal, and twenty-five years of a spy's life gave her the skills to disappear. When she leaves the Avengers, she can see a way forward. If she keeps to herself and lives simply, the money she has in the bank will be more than enough to keep her afloat.

So when Stark offers her twice that amount on her way out the door - exactly twice, to the dollar, like maybe her secret fund isn't all that secret - she can think about not taking it.

"No strings attached," he tells her. "Leave. Stay. Whatever."

"Don't insult me, Tony."

"Money's never an insult," Tony says. Natasha gives him a hard look, and he's bought enough people off in his life that he has the decency to backtrack. "Sometimes it is. But the insult washes off and you've still got the money."

"I'm not leaving because of you."

"I didn't think you were," Tony lies. He's a bad liar, in the way of men who have never learned to lie, because they never had any reason to care whether anyone believed them.

"I'm not leaving because of Banner, either."

"I definitely didn't think that," he says.

Natasha is relieved that he sounds like he means it, because he's not exactly right. She's not leaving because of Bruce in some dumb mushy way, like she'll finally deserve him if she cuts herself off from this life. But you can only throw a friend off a cliff for the greater good so many times before it does something to you that no feat of moral accounting can fix.

She wants to leave before that happens.

"I don't need your money, Stark."

"But I'm giving it to you. It'll be a lot easier for you to accept it than to get me to take 'No' for an answer."

He's right about that, and when she drives away from Cicero, she has no real plan and an extra load of money in an account she never needs to touch. She has a new car, new hair, funky glasses she doesn't need and lots of time to see America, east to west. This takes her as far as Seattle, and she's thinking, "What next?" She thinks about returning to Russia, thinks about it all the time, but she's not ready for everything that would mean - sorting out whether she's forgiven her country, if her country has forgiven her.

Then an old newspaper blows across her path. It shows her a human interest piece about a town on the Canadian border called Peaceful Valley. It's isolated, depressed, and has one of the largest Russian immigrant populations in the country. There's a picture of a woman named Olga, who runs an underfunded community center, helping a serious-faced teenager with her math homework. The whole thing is so on-the-nose that it feels like a message from the cosmos.

Natasha is not somebody who believes in messages from the cosmos. When she starts driving up I-5 to Whatcom County, then, she's not playing along with some New Age Zen navigation bullshit. Clearly not, because that's not the kind of thing she would do.

At the Peaceful Valley Regional Family Center, she introduces herself as Alyona Rostova, daughter of emigre professors. Alyona grew up in California, fell in love with the Northwest when she was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She's between jobs at the moment, doesn't need the money, wonders if the Center could use any volunteers. Olga gives her the justly skeptical look of someone who's seen her share of rich California girls drift through until they get bored, but won't argue with a gift. The ID Natasha presents will pass any background check, and she always liked the name Alyona.

She answers to "Aly."

Any glamorous ideas she had about teaching martial arts to homeless kids evaporate on the first day. Olga needs people to stock the pantry, clean gutters, and update phone lists, but mostly the people who come there need help filling out forms: to apply for government aid programs, fend off collection agencies, dispute health insurance charges if a client is somehow lucky enough to have insurance.

Natasha turns out to be a ninja at forms, and within a few weeks, she's graduated to a crash course on grant writing and fundraising. When Aly comes up with money to fund not only the annual operating budget but two full-time positions (one for herself, and one for a former volunteer who just got her degree from UW), Olga hugs her and Natasha only feels a little guilty that the anonymous donor was 'Tony Stark's hush fund.' The new employee teaches her how to write grants for real, because, who knew, a fuck off fund doesn't stretch too far in the face of systemic poverty and structural unemployment.

She sees a news report about the Avengers and realizes she hasn't thought about them in a week.

*  
It's a rare sunny day, and the center is having a yard sale to support its Pre-Natal Health Initiative. Aly is counting the cash receipts when she sees a man's feet in front of her - hiking sandals with socks, hairy legs, dorky but possibly hot, she's thinking, but doesn't look up until he speaks.

"I, uh, this shirt is my favorite color, I was wondering if you have any more -"

It's a dark purple shirt, of course it is, her mind is still registering the voice as she raises her eyes. "It looks exactly like the one you're wearing," she tells the newcomer.

Bruce Banner shrugs.

"Olga," Natasha says, "the money's all here. I'm going to take a quick break."

"And here I thought I'd made myself impossible to find," says Natasha.

"I've got hidden skills." Bruce scratches the back of his neck, not quite meeting her eyes. "Tracking skills?"

"Barton told you."

"No. That is. Yes. He told me to tell you no, but yes."

"That asshole," Natasha says. But she lets a smile play at her lips. "Are you angry?'

Bruce blinks. "I'm not - well, how do I put this? That is, I am, but, like I've said. . . ."

"I know your secret and all that. But specifically. At me. The way we left things." She swallows, thinks: Waking up the Hulk. Putting you back in the fray when you were ready to walk away. Throwing you off a cliff. "What I did."

He's still looking at the ground. "I didn't come here to - smash, if that's what you mean." Then he looks up to meet her eyes, and the stammering, shy nerd is gone for a moment. "I understand why you did it. It was just the moment, for me, when I knew I couldn't let it keep happening. That I couldn't keep doing it. And that you'd never quit."

Natasha wants to turn away from the force of those unapologetic eyes, but she won't let herself. "Are you glad to know you were wrong? Now that you've seen it for yourself."

"I'm not sure I was wrong," he tells her. "But it means something that you're trying."

Then he reaches out a hand, and she presses her palm into his. And for that moment, it really is that easy.

 **2011 - New York City**

Pepper's meeting is going long. She's in there with the suits from the Energy Commission - "Roxxon stooges," she'd called them with a frown - and so it's Nat's job to break them up.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt, Ms. Potts." She jerks open the door, giving the suits a face that is not at all sorry. She doesn't bother to knock, and there aren't many people who can barge in on Pepper these days. "There's a situation that's going to require your immediate attention with some urgency."

"Oh dear, this is unfortunate." Pepper's 'this is unfortunate' face is very convincing. She would have made a good spy. "Jim, Chuck, Marisol - This is Ms. Rushman, my chief of Security and Operations. I know she wouldn't interrupt me if it weren't a sensitive matter of great urgency."

One stooge's face is growing a little pale. "Are we safe?"

"The situation here at Stark Industrial is very safe," Nat assures him. "It's what we call 'stable but urgent.' It signifies the safest threat level, relatively speaking, but unfortunately, it requires the CEO's attention urgently."

When Nat finishes herding them out the door, Pepper leans back in her executive chair and raises an eyebrow. "Could you have said 'urgent' a few more times?"

"I'm working on getting it into more parts of speech," Nat deadpans. "Urgentify, urgentously. Using urgent as a preposition." Outside, the New York skyline is darkening. "Are you done for the day? If you want to take off, I can put out any fires that flare up tonight."

"Figurative fires, I hope. But be on the lookout for the other kind." Pepper frowns. "These oil companies have such a bug up their butt about clean energy, like they can't see past dollar signs to think about what the world is going to look like in twenty years, much less a hundred, when it's obvious - I'm sorry. I live with a futurist. Sometimes. When we're not on opposite coasts."

"I've heard the rant from Mr. Stark. It sounds better coming from you."

"Less like a rant?" Pepper presses her lips together, an expression Nat knows by now, regretting that she's allowed some private irritation to slip. But then she relaxes into a smile, and says, "I am finished for the day, but I'm not going home just yet." Nat takes the cue to go to the cabinet, start mixing a whiskey and soda. "Tony's in from the West Coast, and I'm glad - I am glad, Natalie. It's just that he can be a lot, and on top of today, that's a lot of a lot. When Stark Tower opens and we can be in the same place at the same time, it will be better - I think it will be better." She takes the drink from Nat's hand. "Thank you, and I was going to say, make yourself one, too, but -"

But Nat is a step ahead. She sits opposite Pepper, raises her own glass, and says, "So is it true?"

Pepper's eyes narrow; she's back on alert again, right away. "Specify."

Asking direct questions goes against the grain of Nat's training, but she's discovered that overt is the way to go with Pepper Potts. Not every CEO would discover a spy in her organization and not only forgive them but promote them - and outbid Nick Fury in the process. The tradeoff is that Nat can't ever give Pepper the impression she is spying. "That crazy story about what SHIELD found in the Arctic. And Mr. Stark being called in to consult."

"Don't believe everything you read on Gawker."

"That's why I'm asking you." Nat tries a playful pout. "Fury never talks to me anymore."

"You think Fury talks to me?"

"Coulson talks to you. And Tony just talks."

"I'm surprised you don't have your own sources."

Nat frowns, because that's a genuine sore spot. "Last time I talked to one of my sources, he tried to sell me some story about a bodybuilder space god with a magical hammer landing in the desert." Nat can't be sure, but she thinks there's a flash of recognition in Pepper's eyes - dammit, she thought Barton had to be fucking with her but maybe he'd been fucking with her by not fucking with her? If that's somehow true -

"Next to that," Pepper says, "Captain America being frozen in the ice for seventy years doesn't even sound that strange. If that could possibly be true. Which of course it couldn't."

"Of course not. It's more impossible than the big green guy who definitely didn't bust up 125th street a few summers ago. Maybe even weirder than a guy trapped in a cave inventing a robot suit and using it to make the world safe for whatever the hell. "

Pepper walks to the window, staring over Grand Central Station, at the new space where Stark Tower is rising. "You mean inventing a power source that revolutionizes clean energy and pisses the hell out of the fossil fuel industry?"

Nat goes to stand behind her, looking at the panorama. "Pepper," she says. "I'm just asking. Is Stark putting a team together?" It's all started running through her head. The super soldier. The living weapon - make that two living weapons. More. Iron Man and War Machine and however many other suits Tony thinks he can fill. Who else? The golden space god, the giant green guy?

"Let's say that he is." Pepper sips her drink. "Do you think that's more important than what we're doing here?"

That depends. With Pepper occupied here, who is going to be there making sure Stark doesn't fuck this up? Natasha believes in Fury, but she trusts him as far as she can throw that magic desert hammer. She owes her life, owes her fucking soul, to Barton, but this is out of his league. Who else could Coulson rely on? Maria Hill, Barbara Morse, Melinda May? Is Hartley still running around out there? What about Triplett, Mackenzie, Fitz and Simmons? And who the hell could all of these people be mobilizing to fight? She isn't sure she likes it. She's pretty sure she's given up her right to be involved.

"Of course, you're right, ma'am," she says. "This is the place for me to be." And Natasha Romanoff, formerly known as the Black Widow, looks out the window and tries to believe this is true.

 **2008 - Sochi, Russia**

"Mama! Mama!" Alya is saying, and that's how Anna wakes up: a three-year-old's head butting into the bottom of her tender breasts.

The glamorous existence of an oligarch's trophy wife, she thinks. If the tabloids only knew.

"Alyenka. Sweetie." Anna catches one of her daughter's curls between her fingers, tries to pinpoint the source of this pounding headache. "Let Mama sleep."

"But I heard a noise."

Anna recognizes the monotone of a newsreader's voice; she fumbles for the remote. "It's just the TV." The sound clicks off, and when she focuses on the large screen at the foot of the bed, captions relay the state news broadcast. They're talking about that American weapons designer who disappeared in Afghanistan. She doesn't need the newsreader's voice to detect the smug undertone: it used to be our problem, now it's theirs.

As though the current problems are any better. She thinks of her husband in Chechnya right now. "Mopping up," the Army calls it. Stealing art from galleries in Grozny, most likely, in Seryozha's case.

"I miss Papa," Alya mumbles into her chest.

"I do, too, little bunny," Anna lies. She sees the bottle left on the nightstand, atrocious wine from a Dagestan vineyard Seryozha claims he's investing in. That explains her muzzy-headedness. She gave the nanny the night off, and fell asleep with Alya in this big empty bed, watching a program that turned into this horrible news.

She clicks again, and the screen goes dark, plunging the whole room with it. "Mama!"

"Alyona Sergeevena! Enough."

"But. I. Heard. A. Noise."

"It's nothing, dochenka." Anna kisses the girl's head, sits as still as she can until Alya relaxes into her. "Just noises the house makes. We're safe here. We're very very safe." It has to be true, because it's what Seryozha has always told them. This vacation home by the water, far from everything, guarded from danger. Safe.

The problem is, this time, Anna hears the noise, too.

"I want some water," Alya says. Anna is relieved and unsettled - because now she has an excuse to go downstairs; because now she has to.

"Stay here, little one. Mama will be right back." She thinks of other instructions: if I don't come back, hide under the bed; run out the back door, down to the guard's shed; call Grandma in Moscow and tell her you're leaving, and run down to the water and run along the shore and run and run and keep running.

She doesn't say them, because that would be silly. They are safe here. Mama will be right back.

In the hallway, she reaches into an alcove by the bedroom door and presses the silent alarm. She doesn't know how to tell if it's working. It doesn't matter because it's safe. She'll go down to the kitchen, pour Alya's water, and wait for the security guard to get here. Have a laugh. Flirt with him a little. Not enough that he'll expect anything, that he'll make a disapproving remark when Seryozha comes home. Just enough to make the silly false alarm worth his while.

She'll go to the kitchen and get a knife. Not that she needs a knife. Once upon a time, she learned to do things with her bare hands. It hasn't been so long. She'll go in the kitchen and get a knife, but before that she'll stop in the hallway and pick up a vase, she'll . . .

A crash sounds across the foyer, and she whirls. There's an arm around her neck and a cold hard circle in the small of her back. "Well, well. Natalia Alianovna," says a female voice. "This is the last place I expected to find one of my sisters."

*  
Natasha sits on the floor with her back against the wall. Although the living room is dim and it's been eight years, Ulyanna's face is one she'll never forget.

"If you're here for me, take me," says Natasha. Her hands sweat against the duct tape, which must be meant more as humiliation than actual restraint. Ulyanna is armed; Natasha is outmatched. "I'm weary of games."

"Don't be foolish, sestra. I'm not here for you." Ulyanna backs against Seryozha's desk. "If you behave, I'll leave you here to wallow in -" she looks up and around at the modernist art gracing the walls, her lip curling. "In whatever you sold your birthright for."

"My birthright?" Natasha laughs, wondering if there's a point in stalling, if it has any purpose. Ulyanna must have disabled the alarm; there can't be anyone coming to save her. No one from the Red Room would be that foolish.

No one from the Red Room should be here.

"If this work is what you think you were born for, Ulyanna Petrovna. . ."

"The work is what we had." Ulyanna spits in contempt. "Such an ordeal was made of leaving, of refusing the final test - If we'd only known that all it meant was a new name, marriage to the highest bidder, a new life on a silver platter."

"Yes, of course. That's exactly why I left." She could explain, but what is there to say? She'd refused the final test, and they buried her in a punishing dull job at a minor ministry. They expected she would beg to come back - girls always begged to come back, Madame B had sneered. But she was stubborn, and the minor ministry was falling apart: Yeltsin's people out, Putin's people in, salaries in worthless rubles that never got paid. Natasha was one of many who simply stopped coming in.

She found an apartment with two girls who served drinks to foreign businessmen at Moscow nightclubs, and brought home foreign currency. Natasha joined them until a French capitalist spotted her, and offered her a job at the desk of his art gallery. There was money and there were men and there was cocaine, and the day that Seryozha walked through the door just happened to be the day she decided it was enough. "That's exactly how easy it was to leave, sister. However did you know?"

Ulyanna reaches behind her back and takes a picture frame from the desk. She stares for a moment, then turns it toward the light. Natasha by the shore with Seryozha; Alya clings to her leg. "And here we all thought you left to have babies."

"Do you really think that's all it was?" It's Natasha's turn to spit with anger. "I didn't need this life, or a husband or a child. I only needed not to turn out like -"

"Like what? Like me? Oh, Natasha, Natasha, if you only knew what your precious wealthy husband, the father of your perfect child -"

"You'd be surprised how much I know," Natasha says, and it's only partly a lie. She can guess what might come out of the woman's mouth. However terrible it is, she is ready for it to be true.

"Oh, I think you are the one who would be -"

The sentence never finishes because three things happen at once: the front door crashes open; the window behind Ulyanna shatters, and her neck erupts in a cascade of blood.

Natasha opens her mouth to scream, but her throat feels dry and all she can think is that the sniper, wherever they're hidden, has done a very sloppy job. She feels hands on the side of her face, hungry kisses against her scalp. "Anyushka, Anyushka, bozhe moi. Praise God." It takes a moment to understand who this man is, why he's kissing her but doesn't know her name. The smell of Seryozha's cologne rouses her before she knows his voice, and slowly she remembers that he met her as 'Anna,' that no one has called her Natasha for years.

"Alyenka. . ." Natasha turns her head. Feet are pounding up the stairs.

"They'll bring her to us," Seryozha promises. Then he looks at the bloody scene. "No, of course. Vanya! Alyosha!" He calls upstairs. "Leave the child in her room! Her mother is coming." He starts to work on her taped hands.

"What is happening?" she hisses. "Why was that woman in our home?"

"It is nothing. That is, it is handled. Business." He kisses her forehead. "Don't overburden yourself, my sunshine."

She jerks back from him, stares into his handsome, aging, stupid face. "I know about business. Ordinary business does not involve people like her. Not even in Russia."

"People like her?" He frowns. "You can have no idea what people like her are like."

"Oh no?" Natasha stands straight, pushes his arm away from her and challenges. "Why don't you try me?"

 **2005 - Somewhere in Iowa**

Barton drives a pickup truck that wouldn't have looked out of place on a collective farm when Natasha's (mostly hypothetical) parents were young. She doesn't make fun of it, though; the bad shocks bouncing over the dirt road and the grinding of ungreased axles beneath them sets off a kind of muscle memory, evoking a pre-Red Room childhood that probably didn't exist. Her hand hangs out of the open window, riding invisible hills in the summer breeze, which carries the scent of the tall, green corn that surrounds them.

If it wasn't Clint behind the wheel, she would be on edge. With anyone else from SHIELD, she would be expecting a bullet in the head as a retirement present. But she trusts this man the way she hasn't trusted anyone in her adult life and besides: if he wanted to kill her, he would have done it in Budapest.

She doesn't know where he's taking her, but she drifts along with him, into the lush green mystery. "So," Natasha says. "This is Iowa."

"Nope," Clint says. "It's heaven."

"That's a curious theology."

"It's a thing they say in _Field of Dreams_. Kevin Costner? Best baseball movie of all time?" He shakes his head. "Never mind, you were a four-year-old Communist. Khrushchev visited my hometown, you know. He loved it."

"You met him personally?"

"Watch it now. I'm not that old." He makes a face. "But there was a picture of him hanging in my kindergarten classroom, shaking hands with some corn farmer. Most famous person who'd ever been to Guthrie County."

"I know about that visit," says Natasha. "It was right before he wrecked the Soviet economy trying to grow American corn in Siberia."

"Damn, Nat. Your worldview is grim."

"It's the kind of thinking that got me here. Speaking of which - where is here, exactly?" The dirt road has turned into gravel, and they round a corner to approach a rambling, two-story house with a wide front porch.

"Yeah. That." He stops the truck, slides out of the cab, and walks around to meet Natasha at the passenger side. "Fury wasn't sure I should show you this, but I pointed out that he's not in charge of you anymore. I told him I'm bringing you here because I trust you."

She makes a show of relaxing, stretching easily, never quite taking her eyes off him as she sits on the front porch steps. "So what is this place?"

"It's - ahh - that is, it's mine. I'm going in deeper, SHIELD's going to be my life. The deal I made with Fury is to let me have this. You're the only other one who knows - so far."

She has to squint into the sun to get a good look at his face, until he sits down next to her. If this is some kind of trust exercise, she doesn't see the point of it. "I'm not going back in," she tells him. "This last mission was one thing. And maybe a second wouldn't be that bad, but then there's a third and there's another, and - I just can't. No. I won't." A final sentence hangs there, without falling from her tongue. None of you can make me.

"You're free," Clint says. "You have a pardon. Nothing is going to change that."

"Unless I fuck up again. Is that the not-so-subtle message here?"

"Nat. . ." He rolls back his head, looks at the sky. "That's not what I'm saying."

It hits her; it's taken much too long to hit her. "You vouched for me. If I backslide, it's not just me that's in trouble. And you want to make sure I know what you have to lose."

"No," he says. "Well, yes. But mostly I want to make sure you know that you have a place to go. I set this place up as a haven for someone I care about - a thing to share with her."

For a second she's angry. Then she's embarrassed. Then she doesn't know how she should feel because in all the work he's done on bringing her over, he's never implied for a moment that there was an ulterior reason. That had been a relief, it had made things easier, but it just showed that even when you could trust a man completely, you couldn't really trust him. She takes a breath, thinks about how to handle this. "I'm flattered, Barton. I really really am but, I'm sorry, I don't think about you that way -" His eyes crinkle, and now she's embarrassed for a different reason, but the embarrassment turns into laughter. "You didn't mean me."

"No, sorry, I can see that was ambiguous. . .I'm engaged. To, uhh, Laura. An Iowa farm girl - eh, farm woman? I met her when I was working at a -" He coughs. "A circus, actually. Doing the obvious job."

"Dog-faced boy?"

"Sharpshooter." He flicks her on the shoulder.

"I don't know how I was supposed to guess something that obscure." She wiggles away from him, and now they're both laughing, and maybe crying a little.

"What I'm trying to say, Little Miss Quips-a-Lot, is that wherever you go, whatever you do, this place is here if you need it. Laura can help you."

Natasha tilts her head. "What if I could help her?"

"Help her with what?"

"Farming, dummy." She flexes a bicep. "Get back to my Russian roots." He's still looking at her blankly, and she rolls her eyes. "Have you even read any Tolstoy?"

"I'm more of a Tchaikovsky guy - crap that's not a writer is it, I knew that."

"Whenever Tolstoy's heroes have to get back to their true roots, they pull out a sickle and start threshing."

"I don't want to let you down, but I'm not sure if threshing is actually a thing they do to corn?"

"I can adapt. I'm not Khrushchev."

"Right. Things didn't end too well for him. Did they? I think?"

Natasha shakes her head. "Americans."

 **Some Time Later**

The Chitauri don't take over the world all at once.

Natasha remembers hearing, some time back in another life, that there are aliens who work that way. Devourers of worlds: one gulp, a bright flash of light, and you're gone. Once upon a time, humanity had the power to do that to itself. Sometimes, she's sorry it didn't go that way.

Most days, though, she doesn't mind being alive. Not that surviving a Chitauri-style apocalypse is any kind of cake walk but at least the (horrific, genocidal) way they run things has a certain logic. They sucked up all the nuclear missiles and power generators in the early days, but they decided the rest of the Earth's energy was best extracted by sending people down to mine for it. And if you have to have people, you need ways to feed them, and you need other people to keep them in line, even entertained. If nothing else, there has to be an apparatus for High King Loki to make his periodic megalomaniacal global broadcasts, and somebody may as well use those airwaves the other twenty-one hours of the day.

So Chitauri-controlled earth has agriculture, government, infrastructure that in some parts of the world is more efficient and up to date than it was before the invasion. And sure, it may only be a few years (months, weeks? Certainly no one will let the population know) before they suck the planet literally dry and move on to more hydrated pastures.

Natasha's not sure that's any different than it's ever been; the Chitauri are just more honest overlords. But she's never been one to wait around for the world to fall apart. In the first days of the invasion, she lost the people she was close to. She doesn't know where or how. She just woke up on the ground with a lump on her head, all alone. She walked and walked, joined in with other people who were walking. They learned she had a good head on her shoulders, that she put up with no nonsense, used force when she had to, but otherwise she would take you in and ask no questions.

Together they made for high ground: a part of the world the Chitauri hadn't stripped yet. They found caves for shelter. Before fleeing her house, one woman had thrown a season's worth of gardening seeds into her pack. She taught those with her to grow plants. They taught others.

Some days the Chitauri fleets darken the sky and everyone hides. Other days are clear. The colony works hard at hunting, farming, controlling the perimeter. One man has an old shortwave radio, but mostly they don't bother. The world will last as long as it will last, and no one wants to hear King Loki's rants anyway.

It wouldn't be fair to say that they are happy. This isn't paradise. No one wants to talk about the future. They don't have the numbers to sustain a population, and they can't guess how long the planet will stay in one piece. But people make friends. They fall in love. They have babies. Natasha watches it all from a distance. Sometimes she gets angry, but she doesn't know what to do with it, so it falls away, into the words of an American song she remembers from back when there were songs. You get used to anything. Sooner or later it becomes your life.

She sleeps alone at night, with her hands on a weapon she's pieced together, something like an old longbow. It won't do much against Chitauri - she laughs herself to sleep, just thinking about it - but the things she does to feel safe have never made much sense.

A girl talks to Natasha, some nights, in her dreams. A dark haired girl whose hair glows with the red of blood or a sunset or a fire engine, red in her eyes and in her hands. She speaks English with an East European lilt, and tosses her head in a way that makes Natasha think of her sisters. _We are looking for you, Natasha Alianovna Romanoff. Searching for our Black Widow, our itsy bitsy spider. Bring our Widow home._

In the dream, Natasha laughs. _If you think I can do anything to fight off the Chitauri, you're barking up the wrong redhead._

 _Some would say if we can't save the world, it's our job to avenge it._

 _That seems like a stupid idea._

 _Do you have a better one?_

 _What are you asking?_

 _You know what I'm asking._ The girl in the dream laughs. _Do you want to be an Avenger?_

Natasha has the same dream five nights in a row. Five nights in a row, she wakes up before she can answer. On the sixth night, she looks in on the thriving gardens, stops by the campfire where her friends are singing songs whose words they have half forgotten.

Then, instead of lying down, Natasha throws her meager belongings over her shoulder and walks out of the camp, thinking _Yes yes yes yes_ , determined to keep thinking until she hears an answer. She walks into the sunset, heading off to find Wanda Maximoff and whoever the hell the Avengers are, on this doomed planet in this numberless year.

Because she's Natasha Romanoff. Because she always looks forward.


End file.
